Cantwell David - Merle Haggard: the running kind

AMERICAN MUSIC SERIES

Peter Blackstock and David Menconi, Editors

Merle

HAGGARD

THE RUNNING KIND

David Cantwell

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

The publication of this book was supported in part by the Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music Series Endowment.

Copyright 2013 by David Cantwell

All rights reserved

First edition, 2013

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Cantwell, David.

Merle Haggard : the running kind / by David Cantwell.First edition.

p. cm.(American music series)

Includes discography.

ISBN 978-0-292-71771-8 (paperback : alkaline paper)

1. Haggard, Merle. 2. Country musiciansBiography. 3. Country musicHistory and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: American music series (Austin, Tex.)

ML420.H115C36 2013

782.421642092dc23

[B]

2013008526

doi:10.7560/717718

ISBN 978-0-292-75416-4 (library e-book)

ISBN 978-0-292-75417-1 (individual e-book)

His wild kind has been among us always, since the beginning: a young man with his temptations, a hero without wings.

OWEN WISTER

Everything in a life depends on how that life accepts its limits...

JAMES BALDWIN

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Silver Wings

Kansas City, Missouri, September 14, 2001

On the Friday after terrorist attacks murdered thousands, crashed four airliners, and reduced New Yorks Twin Towers to rubble, Merle Haggard played a concert in Kansas City, Missouri. The instant he took the stage, he was pelted with requestsdemands, reallythat quickly coalesced into an impatient chant.

Fight! N! Side!

Fight! N! Side!

Fight! N! Side!

It went on and on like that, the fans yelling at the singer, for what seemed like forever. For his part, Merle had the look of a man who knew full well what it was going to be like this night but who was irritated and disappointed just the same when he found out he was right again. He sighed.

For just a second there, the Hag appeared not like a star at all, but like the old man he was, vulnerable and a little frail: At sixty-four, he was only half a decade or so beyond having had his arteries scraped clean by angioplasty. He looked small, too: Merle stands five feet seven but needs cowboy boots to do it. Most of all, he looked world-weary and a little put out by all these people screaming at him, as if they really imagined they could order him around. Hadnt they been paying attention to the words theyd been singing along with all these years? Not even his own mama had been able to tell Merle Haggard what to do.

Haggard shook his head slowly from side to side. And like so much else in his career, the gesture might have been interpreted in a number of ways. Was he telling the audience that he planned to play what he damned well pleased, no matter how aggressive their requests? Was he expressing disbelief at the audiences enthusiasm for him, or disgust at his fans insistence upon a fightin side he seemed, just then, unable or unwilling to muster? Was he merely shaking loose the cobwebs of one more day spent staring out the window of his tour bus? Or was he maybe wishing hed never stepped off it, longing instead to be back on board a Silver Eagle that was so small and known and comfortable that it felt like home sweet home but that felt like a prison cell, as well, and for the same reason?

Merle didnt speak. He just leaned into the mike and started to sing:

Silver wings, shining in the sunlight

Roaring engines, headed somewhere in flight

Theyre taking you away and leaving me lonely

Silver wings, slowly fading out of sight

It was a song hed written a very long time ago, back in the late Sixties when it seemed every song Merle Haggard wrote became an instant country classicand this in an era when country records routinely shimmered with pop appeal and when not a few pop hits exploited a twang and fresh-air charm swiped from their country cousins. The song was Silver Wings, and in 1969 it had played B-side to his Workin Man Blues single, the hit that had provided him with something of a nom de plume in those final moments before another hit, Okie from Muskogee, became his new signature song and new identity. Okie from Muskogee, and its follow-up release, The Fightin Side of Me, had freed Haggard forever from mere country stardom, while also chaining him tightly to an image hed been fighting to live down ever since. Except, that is, whenever he made it a point to live up to it, in the process foiling yet again the expectations of anyone whod have preferred he live it down. The only person who gets to be the boss of Merle Haggard is Merle Haggard.

Haggard didnt leave the stage that night without performing The Fightin Side of Me, of course. But he did it only when he was ready and in the manner he wanted. This shows version of Fightin Side didnt threaten a boot in yer ass, in the justout-lookin-for-a-fight style of Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American), the still-to-come Toby Keith hit that would soon serve as a Fightin Side for a new century. Merles Fightin Side, this night, was much more in the way of a heavy sigh, and a rolling up of the sleeves in order to tackle dirty but necessary work. And members of that evenings audience (though not without a few to-be-expected exceptions) sang along in the same sober fashion Merle went out of his way to model. Weve been getting a lot of requests for this one this week, he introduced the song. We hadnt had to play it for a very long time. Another heavy sigh, and then: Fortunately.

This country doesnt need to be incited with Fightin Side of Me, he explained to me a few weeks later when I asked him about what Id seen. It needs to know that were together, but it sure doesnt need to be incited.

On record all those years ago, Merle had sung the haunted lines of Silver Wings with an aching lilt, and had been backed by a doom-saying piano figure that sounded anguished and felt hopeless. Even so, thanks to the songs relaxed melody and the records shimmering string arrangement, Merle had created a Silver Wings back then that felt openhearted and generous. That Silver Wings offered heartache at its just-loveliest. Tonight, though, Merles pretty imagesmetal wings shining in sunlight all too reminiscent of Tuesdays impossibly bright and blue skysounded hideous. He sang the familiar words in a voice choked and dazed, like he might be about to throw up. The boisterous crowd, which had been spoiling for a fight only a moment before, was shamed silent and turned reverent in a breath. All that rage was pushed aside to reveal the tears and still-bleeding wound beneath.

He closed his show that night, as he so often has, with Okie from Muskogee. The crowd sang along with every word but sounded especially fierce and determined on the line We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse and on that word proud.

Im proud to be an Okie from Muskogee.

Since he first sang those words, in 1969, Merle Haggard has enjoyed artistic and professional triumphs few can match. Hes charted more than one hundred country hits, including thirty-eight chart-toppers and seventy-one top tens. Hes acted in films and on television, entertained presidents and soberly appraised his nation from the cover of Time. Hes released dozens of studio albums and another half dozen or more live ones, performed upwards of ten thousand concerts, been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and seen his songs performed by everyone from Dean Martin to Lynyrd Skynyrd to Elvis Costello, from Tammy Wynette and Willie Nelson to the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan. In 2011 he was even feted, alongside Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey, as a Kennedy Center honoree. So you cant blame the man for taking a lot of pride in what hes accomplished. As he crowed in one song from the heady years just after Okie from Muskogee sent him down the road to becoming not only a star but an icon and even, momentarily, an American idol: Lawd! Lawd! Ive done it all!